We’re working hard to get to the Release Candidate 1 release for NGS. We’ve got lots of code reviews in progress, lots of code being committed and a lot of activity all working towards shipping NGS.

However, as we’re working an exposing new features we’re still getting a number of new bugs submitted that expose other issues that we need to address. This is the problem with porting a very large old codebase — we need to simply slog through it and get it done as soon as we can.

With those caveats, I’ll say that I expect the RC1 release to happen somewhere near the end of November. When we get closer and our bug list is converging, I’ll post an actual date for this release. In the meantime, we’re going to put our heads down and get more work done.

Sorry for being vague about this — but I would much rather not slip anymore releases.

The announcement is that we’re adding Linked Data to the Guardian’s Open Platform. We’ve tagged about 20,000 articles with MusicBrainz IDs and ISBNs, and we’ll add more sources soon.

So, for example, if you want to use our Cee Lo coverage on your web site or for an iPhone or iPad app or wherever, you can query the Open Platform to get content from the Guardian to integrate your app.

We’re finishing up work on the migration scripts and we’re hoping to finalize the last schema change for NGS next week. After that the NGS schema will be officially frozen in anticipation of the release. After this change I will update the data on the test server and restart the replication feed for one (hopefully) last time.